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Sunday, 21 January 2018

Having watched Cathy Newman's Jordan Peterson interview again, I have to say she put in a monumentally lousy performance

Yes, I know I'm late to this game, and that commenter David Moss has already provided a link to a Spectator article about the Channel 4 interview - but it's just been one of those weeks. I've now watched it again, and, while Little Miss Prim's failure to land a single punch while leaping into every logical elephant trap as it appears in front of her (each with its own large sign reading "Whatever You Do, Avoid This Trap Or You'll Look Very Very Silly Indeed")...
...is squirm-inducingly embarrassing - watching a privileged, finger-wagging, left-liberal metropolitan SJW would-be bully making a complete and utter fool of herself by trying to treat a man with an intellect exponentially more original, questing and keener than her own as if she were a kindergarten teacher ticking off one of her charges for shouting out "Bum!" in class is just too deliciously, gloriously Schadenfreudtastic for me not to give it an outing on this blog (besides, the Spectator is behind a paywall):

Here, for those of you who like the cut of the Professor's jib, are some of his highlights to date (no doubt Cathy Newman's humiliation will soon to added to the mix):

I'll leave you with one of my favourite Peterson quotes - one that goes a long way to explaining why arguing with New Left cultists (unless for the purpose of ridiculing them) is both infuriating and intellectually unstimulating:

“If you have a comprehensive explanation for everything then it decreases uncertainty and anxiety and reduces your cognitive load. And if you can use that simplifying algorithm to put yourself on the side of moral virtue, then you’re constantly a good person with a minimum of effort.”

5 comments:

Yes, it`s a fascinating spectacle as she (or her briefing team) increasingly runs out of ideas and arguments, until towards the end all she has left is to abandon script and go all Humphries Today programme on him. Ironically, for all that she descends into putting to him ever more ridiculous propositions that he has very obviously not made, in order to try and catch him out, she brings out a degree of analytical argumentation from him that doesn't always come across in his own lectures.

So yes, she is completely out of her depth, huffs and puffs and cuts across him constantly but she still ends up bringing out a brilliant performance from the person she has interviewed. Top marks, Cathy. Job done. Unintentionally.

What's really strange about it is why Cathy Newman evidently thought it was her job to debate Peterson, rather than conduct an interview. She couldn't even fall back on the tired old John Humphrys line about just asking the questions the public would want him to ask (er...no). I watched a YouTube video of a psychologist analysing the interview, and he suggested that the sheer awfulness of Newman's performance, ending in brain-freeze, was the result of cognitive dissonance - half of her understood the logic of Peterson's arguments, but the other half simply couldn't accept his conclusions, hence the desperate need to pretend he had said things he hadn't said. The best meme I've seen features Petserson on one side saying "I had bacon and eggs for breakfast" and Newman responding with "So you think all vegans should be killed."